Jonathan Aron has been in the commercial real estate business for more than a quarter century. In that time he has been on every side of real estate transactions, from his days as a corporate broker for Rite Aid Pharmacy in the 80s through positions as a retail leasing broker and investment sales broker. After a successful run at NAI Hunneman, Aron was recently named vice president of investment sales at KeyPoint Partners LLC in Burlington.

Jonathan Aron

Title: Vice President of Investment Sales,

KeyPoint Partners in Burlington

Age: 53

Experience: 29 Years

You have been in the business a long time. How did you get your start?

I went to law school and after that I went to work at a brokerage. That was in 1981. Except for a four-year period when I was in the stock trade business, I’ve been in various positions in the real estate business since then.

Stock trading? That’s a bit of a departure.

Real estate has been my professional passion but my other passion has been the stock market, and I had an opportunity to try it. It was 1999-2003, sort of a crazy time in the market. I did well for the first couple of years, and then not as well the subsequent couple of years. And so I got back into real estate.

How did that experience influence you when you came back into real estate?

If you think of all of the seats at a retail closing table representing all of the different people in a real estate transaction, I have sat in all of those seats. I’ve been a leasing broker, I’ve been a tenant rep broker, I was in the corporate real estate department at Rite Aid. I had my own tenant rep firm. I developed several properties and was the buyer and, later, the seller. When I came back I wanted to sit in one of the only seats I hadn’t sat in yet, and that would be the investment sales broker.

When you first came back as an investment sales broker it was with NAI Hunneman. Tell me about some of the deals there.

A lot of those deals were drug store-related in some way. I sold quite a few single-tenant drugstores, strip malls or retail centers that are anchored by drugstores. I have sold some larger things. The most notable that I have been involved in was the Bank of America tower in Providence. That’s the tallest building in Rhode Island and Bank of America leases the whole building. It’s a single-tenant transaction and it’s a great asset. It’s known as the Superman building.

Why do they call it that?

Well on the old Superman TV show which was on in the fifties, at the beginning of the show they would say: “look it’s a bird, it’s a plane” and then show Superman jumping over a building – and it’s that building!

In April 2008, you wrote a small op-ed piece for Banker & Tradesman that essentially said, despite the credit crunch, that commercial real estate remained a solid investment. Two years later, is that still true?

There are really two segments of the market that are really liquid, and that’s the bottom 10 percent of the market and the top 10 percent of the market. The 80 percent in the middle is not so liquid.

That bottom 10 percent are assets that are distressed and are being sold through a bankruptcy receiver, or are in some other way distressed. Maybe they have significant vacancy. For example, I just completed a transaction on a shopping center in Rhode Island. It was 130,000 square feet and it was 2/3 vacant. Now those kinds of deals, the prices are deeply discounted.

Now the other part of the market that’s active is the top 10 percent. A lot of them are single-tenant properties like a drug store or just a stand-alone grocery store. Also, [there’s] multi-tenant properties that are completely stabilized in top markets. Those are salable as well. The 80 percent in the middle aren’t as salable.

What kind of properties are in that middle 80 percent?

Maybe something like a multi-tenant asset outside of [Route] 128, something with a little bit of a rural location. Maybe it has 15 percent to 20 percent vacancy. Maybe the rents are too high for the market. People don’t want to buy based on income when rents aren’t sustainable, and when the rents turn over they are going to be at a lower level. So there’s not a lot of interest there.

Aron’s Top 5 Favorite New England Shopping Centers:

Copley Place Mall, Boston

Chestnut Hill Mall, Newton/Brookline

Shoppers World, Framingham

Legacy Place, Dedham

Newbury Street, Boston